BMW Group Asia uses Tableau to drive performance across 14 markets
BMW Group Asia's business has returned to pre-pandemic levels
Improved mitigation of retention risk and recurring warranty issues
Automated reporting, leading to an approximate savings of 30% of time by the creation of these dashboards
Founded in 1985, BMW Group Asia is the regional office overseeing 14 importer markets across East Asia and South Asia for both BMW and MINI brands. These stretch from New Caledonia and Tahiti in the East to Sri Lanka and Bangladesh in the West and Nepal in the North. It plays the role of a business incubator for these markets, introducing product and technology that best caters to customers’ needs in this part of the world. To manage aftersales parts and services, customer retention, and customer satisfaction ratings across the entire dealer network in the region, BMW Group Asia needed a way to manage and extract insights from its data. Fernando Ferrer, Customer Support Director, BMW Group Asia, shared, “Handling KPIs for one market is tough enough, but if you multiply that by 14, the complexity increases exponentially. We needed to find a data visualization tool to manage this information, and our business, more efficiently. After evaluating a variety of solutions, BMW Group Asia decided Tableau was the optimal solution and engaged Billigence to support the implementation. Asked about the business impact of Tableau, Ferrer said, "Tableau plays an essential role in helping us drive performance, and I'm happy to say our business is now approaching pre-pandemic levels."
Visualizations unlock data needed to steer the business
BMW Group Asia's Customer Support team alone handles an extensive amount of data, for everything from parts and labor, to warranties and technical support. It wanted to consolidate the data into simplified dashboards to make it easier to analyze. Billigence, a Tableau partner and business intelligence consultancy, was brought in to bring these dashboards to life and help the business extract deeper insights from the data. The consultants from Billigence worked closely with BMW Group Asia to understand the business's pain points and visualize its data in the most useful way.
My team focused on identifying what we wanted to visualize, and Billigence focused on visualizing it for us. It was the perfect partnership
One of the barriers to adoption was the team's reliance on existing spreadsheets. To overcome this, Ferrer led from the front and switched to reviewing all performance data in Tableau. Multiple training sessions and enablement workshops were held to broaden the team's knowledge of data literacy and the Tableau platform. In addition, internal meetings were held to break down data silos within the business and agree on definitions of metrics to be tracked. Currently all area managers within BMW Group Asia's customer support team use Tableau, and other departments are exploring using Tableau as well. Tableau acts as their single source of truth and also has automated reporting, leading to cost and time savings. "We still have spreadsheets and other sources of data as backup, but we primarily use Tableau to steer the business," said Ferrer. "It gives us granular insights into our data that help us adapt and address issues quickly."
Data-driven decisions improve support and get businesses back on track
One visualization BMW Group Asia has is the customer retention dashboard. It allows the department to track which customers are most loyal and identify segments that it needs to take action to retain.
Another key dashboard tracks BMW Group Asia's Net Promoter Score (NPS) in each market, helping the business react faster to customer feedback and take necessary actions to improve its processes or services.
These and other visualizations created during the pandemic helped compensate for the fact that area managers were unable to travel and access the usual intelligence gained from dealer visits.
"We rely on this data to manage our business, and in the past, it was all scattered in different databases," said Ferrer. "Tableau helped us bring all our KPIs and metrics into one place so we could review performance online. It was difficult at first, but everyone quickly adjusted to the new normal, and, with Tableau and other digital tools implemented during that time, we've brought the business back to where it was before the pandemic."
Next, BMW Group Asia plans to create external-facing dashboards for dealers. This will improve collaboration between BMW Group Asia and dealers and ultimately allow for better customer relationship management.
We rely on this data to manage our business, and in the past, it was all scattered in different databases. Tableau helped us bring all our KPIs and metrics into one place so we could review performance online.
